The genius new product that lets you crack open eggs... Oh, hello I was just working on
a multi-million dollar lawsuit...
Imagine if electrical power suddenly went out for millions of people. And not
just for hours, but for months, and maybe even years. Throwing our world into chaos
and crippling everything from communication to food and water distribution. It sounds
like the start of a post-apocalyptic movie, but there's a real possibility
that it could happen. It's called a low- probability, high-consequence event. A
massive solar storm could knock out electrical power and wreak havoc on
nearly every aspect of modern life. But it's not something we're really
preparing for because for most of us, it just doesn't register as a big threat.
But here's the thing. It's happened before. If you were around on September
1st 1859, it would have been a pretty weird day. As the sun set, the night sky
lit up with a brilliant light show. These were Auroras. Electrically charged
particles from the Sun colliding with the Earth's atmosphere. And, they were so
bright in some parts of the world, you could read a newspaper outside in the
middle of the night. And you could even see these Aurora's as far south as
Hawaii, where they'd never been seen before. What little electronics we had back then,
well, they suddenly went haywire. Telegraph lines overloaded, threw
Sparks even lit Telegraph paper on fire. This was the solar storm of 1859, often
referred to as the Carrington Event. If if it happened today, well, it could knock
us back a hundred years to a pre- electrical age. So what exactly is a
solar storm? It's basically a catch-all term for when the Sun erupts a bunch of
mass and energy into space. It usually starts with sunspots, cooler
areas on the surface of the Sun that form over areas of intense magnetic
activity. It's these sunspots that are tied to an increase in phenomenon
known as solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections (or CMEs for short). Solar flares are
energetic explosions they can blast enormous amounts of energy and particles
towards Earth. While a lot of it is deflected by the Earth's magnetic field
and atmosphere, solar flares can still interfere with communications and
navigation systems. But it's a large CME that can cause
real chaos for modern technology. It's an eruption of the sun's magnetized plasma
that is then carried to Earth by solar wind, where it can overwhelm the Earth's
magnetic field. All of this activity tends to peak about every 11 years or so.
A flurry of particularly bad solar flares and CMEs can cause real havoc to
our electrical systems, potentially throwing large parts of the world into
darkness. We've had glimpses of what this can do to modern technology. In 1989, a
CME much smaller than the Carrington Event hit Canada's province of Quebec,
damaging electrical transformers and leaving 3 million people without
electricity. And, we had a pretty big scare in 2012, when it looked like a CME on
the scale of the Carrington event might hit earth. (FOX News Coverage ..."the electric power grid would
be wiped out by the current, lights and computers, transportation, hospitals all
would go down... the study warns it would be a disaster far worse than anything we
have seen before") It ended up passing through Earth's orbit and missing the
Earth by a margin of 9 days. But had it hit us, we might still be picking up the
pieces years later. Geomagnetically induced
currents could have damaged hundreds of high-voltage electrical transformers all
at the same, time crippling our electrical grid. And it's not like we
keep a bunch of spare transformers stored away somewhere. It would take
months or years to fully repair and replace damaged infrastructure. And the
consequences of that? Far-reaching and devastating. The problem is, the cost of
protecting our electrical infrastructure from a Carrington level event would run
into the billions. But at least we'll see the next one coming. Our ability to
monitor the sun's activity is improving quickly we're now collecting data on
everything from solar wind to sun oscillations, to changes in the sun's
magnetic field. We will now have some warning before the next Carrington-level
Event happens. That might give us some time to prepare, kind of like we would
for a major hurricane. We could preemptively shut down electrical
systems or even large portions of the grid. But all this would take serious
coordination between government and private industry. But there's been some
progress on that too. Countries around the world are taking the threat more seriously.
There's a bill before US Congress to further improve solar storm observation
capability and to better coordinate the response of agencies if one hits. It's
not a matter of if but when the next one hits. It's been 150 years since the
Carrington Event. Maybe we can take some comfort in the fact that it might well
just be another 150 years until the next big one hits. That damn CNN...